Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking By Susan Cain
《内向性格的竞争力》 苏珊·凯恩
Every introverts should read this book. Susan Cain bring together the leading researches in Phycology, Neuroscience, life story and partial advice from and for introverts.
First of all, Introversion is not a problem. Business and Financial become over-competitive and neglect risk largely due to the cooperate culture of extroversion. Second, Introversion has genetical and physiological base, people can not just “come out of their shell.” Lastly, even the most introverted people can, through practice, expand the social situation that she is competent in, if that thing is align with her core value. This is by no mean a complete summary.
孔子曰:「言寡尤，行寡悔，祿在其中」老子曰「言多詞窮，不如守中」
然而，不知从何时开始，或许是受西方文化影响，我们也越来越推崇外向，推崇表现。各种少儿才艺大赛，到微博抖音网红，再到公司文化团建，“美式”活跃，主动，展示的人际文化几乎成为主流。苏珊在书中把东亚儒家文化圈描绘成内向者的理想环境，但事实可能并非如此。
如果你是内向者，强烈推荐阅读，这将是一本自我发现之道的书。作者结合了心理学，脑神经学最新研究，各行各业的内向者的真实故事，和实用可行的建议方法。
附言：我读的是英文原版，总结是自己野生翻译，可能于中文版不一致。
附言2: 虽然没有读中文版，但严重怀疑翻译水平。这个中文标题完全就没有理解书中内容，书中有一个章节明明说到，内向和外向的一个区别是，内向者偏好合作，避免冲突，而外向者才是偏好竞争。结果书名居然翻译成“内向性格的竞争力”，真是让人无语吐血。私以为，还不如直译为《安静：在纷杂世界中内向的力量》
Notes——摘录
• Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.
• In the Culture of Character, the ideal self was serious, disciplined, and honorable. What counted was not so much the impression one made in public as how one behaved in private. The word personality didn’t exist in English until the eighteenth century, and the idea of “having a good personality” was not widespread until the twentieth.
• Susman famously wrote. “Every American was to become a performing self.”
• The risk with our students is that they’re very good at getting their way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going the right way.”
• The lesson, says Collins, is clear. We don’t need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.
• His hypothesis was that extroverted leaders enhance group performance when employees are passive, but that introverted leaders are more effective with proactive employees.
• introverts are uniquely good at leading initiative-takers. Because of their inclination to listen to others and lack of interest in dominating social situations, introverts are more likely to hear and implement suggestions.
• They may want to learn to sit down so that others might stand up.
• We “think different” (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer’s famous ad campaign).
• The New Groupthink elevates teamwork above all else. It insists that creativity and intellectual achievement come from a gregarious place. It has many powerful advocates.
• What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement.
• The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” writes the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”
• Peer pressure, in other words, is not only unpleasant, but can actually change your view of a problem.
• Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything. —ROBERT RUBIN, In an Uncertain World
• “No!” Kagan exclaims. “Every behavior has more than one cause. Don’t ever forget that!
• To ask whether it’s nature or nurture, says Kagan, is like asking whether a blizzard is caused by temperature or humidity. It’s the intricate interaction between the two that makes us who we are.
• On the one hand, according to the theory of gene-environment interaction, people who inherit certain traits tend to seek out life experiences that reinforce those characteristics.
• Conversely, high-reactive children may be more likely to develop into artists and writers and scientists and thinkers because their aversion to novelty causes them to spend time inside the familiar—and intellectually fertile—environment of their own heads.
• Disapproval makes them feel anxious, and since anxiety is unpleasant, they learn to steer clear of antisocial behavior. This is known as internalizing their parents’ standards of conduct, and its core is anxiety.
• “the orchid hypothesis” by David Dobbs in a wonderful article in The Atlantic. This theory holds that many children are like dandelions, able to thrive in just about any environment. But others, including the high-reactive types that Kagan studied, are more like orchids: they wilt easily, but under the right conditions can grow strong and magnificent.
• orchid children are more strongly affected by all experience, both positive and negative.
• the sensitivities and the strengths are a package deal. High-reactive kids who enjoy good parenting, child care, and a stable home environment tend to have fewer emotional problems and more social skills than their lower-reactive peers, studies show.
• The parents of high-reactive children are exceedingly lucky, Belsky told me. “The time and effort they invest will actually make a difference. Instead of seeing these kids as vulnerable to adversity, parents should see them as malleable—for worse, but also for better.”
• Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act. —MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI
• “rubber band theory” of personality. We are like rubber bands at rest. We are elastic and can stretch ourselves, but only so much.
• ARAS regulates the balance between over- and under-arousal by controlling the amount of sensory stimulation that flows into the brain;
• Once you understand introversion and extroversion as preferences for certain levels of stimulation, you can begin consciously trying to situate yourself in environments favorable to your own personality—neither overstimulating nor understimulating, neither boring nor anxiety-making.
• There is no one more courageous than the person who speaks with the courage of his convictions.
• “if a person is standing in the corner of a room, you can attribute about fifteen motivations to that person. But you don’t really know what’s going on inside.” Yet inner behavior was still behavior, thought
• guilt is a tainted word, but it’s probably one of the building blocks of conscience.
• “Functional, moderate guilt,” writes Kochanska, “may promote future altruism, personal responsibility, adaptive behavior in school, and harmonious, competent, and prosocial relationships with parents, teachers, and friends.”
• High-reactive introverts sweat more; low-reactive extroverts sweat less. Their skin is literally “thicker,” more impervious to stimuli, cooler to the touch. In fact, according to some of the scientists I spoke to, this is where our notion of being socially “cool” comes from; the lower-reactive you are, the cooler your skin, the cooler you are. (Incidentally, sociopaths lie at the extreme end of this coolness barometer, with extremely low levels of arousal,
• When you go to a football game and someone offers you a beer, says the personality psychologist Brian Little, “they’re really saying hi, have a glass of extroversion.”
• “Because it is impossible to control the blush intentionally,” Dijk speculates, blushing is an authentic sign of embarrassment. And embarrassment, according to Keltner, is a moral emotion. It shows humility, modesty, and a desire to avoid aggression and make peace. It’s not about isolating the person who feels ashamed (which is how it sometimes feels to easy blushers), but about bringing people together.
• “Embarrassment reveals how much the individual cares about the rules that bind us to one another.”
• From fruit flies to house cats to mountain goats, from sunfish to bushbaby primates to Eurasian tit birds, scientists have discovered that approximately 20 percent of the members of many species are “slow to warm up,” while the other 80 percent are “fast” types who venture forth boldly without noticing much of what’s going on around them.
• all good nor all bad, but a mix of pros and cons whose survival value varies according to circumstance.
• In most settings, people use small talk as a way of relaxing into a new relationship, and only once they’re comfortable do they connect more seriously. Sensitive people seem to do the reverse. They “enjoy small talk only after they’ve gone deep,” says Strickland. “When sensitive people are in environments that nurture their authenticity, they laugh and chitchat just as much as anyone else.”
• A reward-sensitive person is highly motivated to seek rewards—from a promotion to a lottery jackpot to an enjoyable evening out with friends. Reward sensitivity motivates us to pursue goals like sex and money, social status and influence. It prompts us to climb ladders and reach for faraway branches in order to gather life’s choicest fruits.
• too sensitive to rewards. Reward sensitivity on overdrive gets people into all kinds of trouble.
• interesting feature of extroversion; it is what makes an extrovert an extrovert. Extroverts, in other words, are characterized by their tendency to seek rewards, from top dog
• “like anyone, be drawn from time to time to sex, and parties, and status, but the kick they get will be relatively small, so they are not going to break a leg to get there.” In short, introverts just don’t buzz as easily.
• When introverts hit the number nine button and find they’ve lost a point, they slow down before moving on to the next number, as if to reflect on what went wrong. But extroverts not only fail to slow down, they actually speed up.
• Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal test,
• if you leave them to their own devices, the introverts tend to sit around wondering about things, imagining things, recalling events from their past, and making plans for the future. The extroverts are more likely to focus on what’s happening around them. It’s as if extroverts are seeing “what is” while their introverted peers are asking “what if.”
• In a state of flow, you’re neither bored nor anxious, and you don’t question your own adequacy. Hours pass without your noticing. The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings.
• that are not about approach or avoidance, but about something deeper: the fulfillment that comes from absorption in an activity outside yourself.
• Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai, whose entire investment strategy was based on FUD: they placed bets that had limited downside, but would pay off handsomely if dramatic but unexpected changes occurred in the market.
• “Success in investing doesn’t correlate with IQ,” he has said. “Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.”
• Asians are “not uncomfortable with who they are, but are uncomfortable with expressing who they are.
• Quiet persistence requires sustained attention—in effect restraining one’s reactions to external stimuli.
• A man has as many social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups. —WILLIAM JAMES
• “person-situation” debate:
• Situationism posits that our generalizations about people, including the words we use to describe one another—shy, aggressive, conscientious, agreeable—are misleading. There is no core self; there are only the various selves of Situations X, Y, and Z.
• Erving Goffman, author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, suggested that social life is performance and social masks are our true selves.
• According to Free Trait Theory, we are born and culturally endowed with certain personality traits—introversion, for example—but we can and do act out of character in the service of “core personal projects.”
• Yes, we are only pretending to be extroverts, and yes, such inauthenticity can be morally ambiguous (not to mention exhausting), but if it’s in the service of love or a professional calling, then we’re doing just as Shakespeare advised.
• introverts who were especially good at acting like extroverts tended to score high for a trait that psychologists call “self-monitoring.” Self-monitors are highly skilled at modifying their behavior to the social demands of a situation. They look for cues to tell them how to act. When in Rome, they do as the Romans do, according to the psychologist Mark Snyder, author of Public Appearances, Private Realities, and creator of the Self-Monitoring Scale.
• the highest self-monitors not only tend to be good at producing the desired effect and emotion in a given social situation—they also experience less stress while doing so.
• To high self-monitors, low self-monitors can seem rigid and socially awkward. To low self-monitors, high self-monitors can come across as conformist and deceptive—“more pragmatic than principled,”
• But Little, an ethical and sympathetic man who happens to be an extremely high self-monitor, sees things differently. He views self-monitoring as an act of modesty. It’s about accommodating oneself to situational norms, rather than “grinding down everything to one’s own needs and concerns.” Not all self-monitoring is based on acting, he says, or on working the room.
• three key steps to identifying your own core personal projects.
• “Restorative niche” is Professor Little’s term for the place you go when you want to return to your true self.
• A Free Trait Agreement acknowledges that we’ll each act out of character some of the time—in exchange for being ourselves the rest of the time. It’s a Free Trait Agreement when a wife who wants to go out every Saturday night and a husband who wants to relax by the fire work out a schedule: half the time we’ll go out, and half the time we’ll stay home. It’s a Free Trait Agreement when you attend your extroverted best friend’s wedding shower, engagement celebration, and bachelorette party, but she understands when you skip out on the three days’ worth of group activities leading up to the wedding itself.
• “Emotional labor,” which is the effort we make to control and change our own emotions, is associated with stress, burnout, and even physical symptoms like an increase in cardiovascular disease. Professor Little believes that prolonged acting out of character may also increase autonomic nervous system activity, which can, in turn, compromise immune functioning.
• The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed. —CARL JUNG
• She has always been attracted to extroverts, who she says “do all the work of making conversation. For them, it’s not work at all.”
• Your degree of extroversion seems to influence how many friends you have, in other words, but not how good a friend you are.
• introverts and extroverts; studies suggest that the former tend to be conflict-avoiders, while the latter are “confrontive copers,” at ease with an up-front, even argumentative style of disagreement.
• introverts like people they meet in friendly contexts; extroverts prefer those they compete with.
• catharsis hypothesis is a myth—a plausible one, an elegant one, but a myth nonetheless. Scores of studies have shown that venting doesn’t soothe anger; it fuels it.
• And introverts are pretty fine decoders, according to several studies predating the Lieberman experiments. One of these studies actually found that introverts were better decoders than extroverts.
• But these studies measured how well introverts observe social dynamics, not how well they participate in them. Participation
• Jon has launched Global Empowerment Coaching,
• “I discovered early on that people don’t buy from me because they understand what I’m selling,” explains Jon. “They buy because they feel understood.”
• even parents who still have work to do on their own self-esteem can be enormously helpful to their kids, according to Miller. Advice
• Slowly your child will see that it’s worth punching through her wall of discomfort to get to the fun on the other side. She’ll learn how to do the punching by herself.
• “If you’re consistent in helping your young child learn to regulate his or her emotions and behaviors in soothing and supportive ways, something rather magical will begin to happen: in time, you might watch your daughter seem to be silently reassuring herself: ‘Those kids are having fun, I can go over there.’
• Encourage him to look confident even if he’s not feeling it. Three simple reminders go a long way: smile, stand up straight, and make eye contact.
• She divides the class into three groups of seven kids each: a legislative group, tasked with enacting a law to regulate lunchtime behavior; an executive group, which must decide how to enforce the law; and a judicial branch, which has to come up with a system for adjudicating messy eaters.
• The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself.
• “Forcing highly apprehensive young people to perform orally is harmful,” writes McCroskey. “It will increase apprehension and reduce self-esteem.”
• I was able to create this loop between who I am now and who I was then.”
• It didn’t matter what he was interested in, so long as he pursued it and enjoyed himself.
• redemptive life story—and a sign of mental health and well-being.
• The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk.
• Figure out what you are meant to contribute to the world and make sure you contribute it. If this requires public speaking or networking or other activities that make you uncomfortable, do them anyway. But accept that they’re difficult, get the training you need to make them easier, and reward yourself when you’re done.
• Don’t expect them to follow the gang. Encourage them to follow their passions instead.
• the next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the powers of quiet.
• The rest of my family took its cue from him. In our house, reading was the primary group activity. On Saturday afternoons we curled up with our books in the den. It was the best of both worlds: you had the animal warmth of your family right next to you, but you also got to roam around the adventure-land inside your own head.
• “Israel,” meaning one who wrestles inwardly with God)
• For similar reasons, I’ve used the layperson’s spelling of extrovert rather than the extravert one finds throughout the research literature.